I got involved with art because in art I found joy. I found self-abandonment.
And yet, for the last 30, 40 years, power is all the dried-up prunes who rule the academic roost want to talk about when they look at art.
The majority of credentialed art historians today hate art. They want to deconstruct it, unpack it, demystify it, and, ultimately, kill it. They're on a mission to convince everybody, but primarily themselves, that great art is a fiction, that inspiration is a scam, that the piercing joy with which genuine art wounds the heart is but a tool of male domination. Their sterile emptiness condemns them to an obsession with power, and anyone whose overriding craving is for power is incapable of appreciating art because art is humbling not empowering. The experience of art is similar to the experience of the sacred: it demolishes the ego, it plunges you in the abyss of your nothingness, in the depths of which you can, for a moment, experience a blissful connection to everything.
There is no question that in order for canons to be renewed they must at various intervals be upended. But that upending must be at the hands of newer, more vigorous artists whose destructive gestures are necessary to release a living tradition from the dead encrustations that are strangling it. Academic deconstruction is something else altogether because it is purely intellectual and allied with a neurotic hatred of what the intellect cannot apprehend or circumscribe.
Fortunately, art abides. Maybe not in au courant galleries and museums, desperate as they are to display their abjection to the latest "transgressive" trend, which in every instance turns out to be yet another genuflection in front of some well-worn liberal cliché. No, art lives elsewhere, in the cultural vortexes that occasionally and unpredictably form within the smooth flows of commerce and entertainment.
Art survives now by disguising itself as something too dumb to be taken seriously.